I initially began designing my vILT directly in PowerPoint, but I struggled to bring my vision to life in a visually engaging way. Then, I had an epiphany: I could leverage Canva templates to establish a clean, consistent visual style. Throughout my design process, I made sure to use repeating templates for related content, creating a sense of familiarity and comfort for the learner. 

After researching best practices, I discovered that progress bars not only keep learners engaged but also help maintain their motivation, which was something I can relate to as a former competitive athlete always aware of the clock and psychologically altering my effort level and engagement based on my time awareness.

At first, my target audience was limited to financial analysts, but as I developed the scenario videos, I realized they wouldn’t be customer-facing, and I couldn’t easily showcase SQL-driven data that would support my story. So, I pivoted to include a broader audience of bank officers, who are customer-facing and more in line with the scenarios I was creating. To further enhance engagement, I introduced various interactive elements such as Zoom chat waterfalls, reactions, Padlet, Mentimeter, and even Blooket (with a cryptohack theme!). This was a truly enjoyable and immersive design and development process for me, and I really got into it.

I initially began designing my vILT directly in PowerPoint, but I struggled to bring my vision to life in a visually engaging way. Then, I had an epiphany: I could leverage Canva templates to establish a clean, consistent visual style. Throughout my design process, I made sure to use repeating templates for related content, creating a sense of familiarity and comfort for the learner. 

After researching best practices, I discovered that progress bars not only keep learners engaged but also help maintain their motivation, which was something I can relate to as a former competitive athlete always aware of the clock and psychologically altering my effort level and engagement based on my time awareness.

At first, my target audience was limited to financial analysts, but as I developed the scenario videos, I realized they wouldn’t be customer-facing, and I couldn’t easily showcase SQL-driven data that would support my story. So, I pivoted to include a broader audience of bank officers, who are customer-facing and more in line with the scenarios I was creating. To further enhance engagement, I introduced various interactive elements such as Zoom chat waterfalls, reactions, Padlet, Mentimeter, and even Blooket (with a cryptohack theme!). This was a truly enjoyable and immersive design and development process for me, and I really got into it.